Cloud is the answer. It has to be doesn't it? And its all about software, right? Wrong. I'm at VMworld in Copenhagen this week and its not just about software and its not all about virtual. Sean Regan walked around the show and found 14 hardware boxes that weigh more than him. Cloud? Maybe - clouds aren't weighed down by steel boxes. Consolidation? Maybe. Some of its expansion, especially in storage, but shhh, don't tell anyone; its a secret.

From customers I've talked to here it seems to be all about doing more with existing hardware. Getting the cloud you want from the infrastructure you've got. That sounds like its a blend of physical and virtual, not just all about virtual. Symantec can take the hardware you've got today and help you build a cloud infrastructure on top of it in partnership with VMware. Once you've built that infrastructure, we'll help you protect it too. Can you imagine deploying a physical production...

Background:

NetBackup does not treat media and the contents of data (images) written to Virtual Tape Libraries (VTLs) any differently to real Tape Libraries.

A mile high view of the process after the 'expiry date' of each NetBackup image has passed :
- Removes the image from the image database
- Decrements the number of valid images on the media in question in the media database (a table within the EMM db since NetBackup 6).
- Once the number of valid images in the media db reaches zero, the 'assigned' field in the volume database (a table within the EMM db since NetBackup 6) is cleared
   Optionally the tape is moved back into the 'Scratch' pool (if configured).
   Note: It is best practice is to configure a Scratch pool.

Nothing in the above process touches either the media or library. For "real" libraries, the media can be out of the library and...

Last time, we looked at how to create our drive usage using dummy data.  Now, we need to get some real data.  To start with, I've installed OpsCenter and I created a custom report based on the Tabular Backup Report:

I customized the report by clicking on "Edit Report" and changing the filters so I only have the policies and clients that I know use drives.  I set the range to be the past 60 days.

Once done, I saved the report to a custom report in my Public Reports folder, so I can access it easily whenever I want to generate the data.  To export the data, I click on the export button and export it to a CSV.  I can then open the CSV and remove the first and last lines (headers and footer) of the CSV.  We're now ready to process it.

Now that we...

I love using NetBackup OpsCenter.  Using its reports in conjunction with the Administrator Console can greatly help reduce triage time, and help provide reports that your manager and/or director can understand, when speaking to them in terms of cost savings, backup windows, storage availability, and data growth.  OpsCenter helps to take the data from Netbackup and put it into a nice visual form.

What it doesn't do on its own, though, is create a tape drive usage report in a format that I want (though, if I had the Analytics license, I could probably program this).  So, I created a not-so-simple perl program to create my intended usage table.

My intended table is supposed to look like this: